Autoimmune diseases are diseases arising from aberrant response of the immune system against one's own substances and tissues. There are more than 80 different types of autoimmune diseases that, collectively, amount to the number two cause of chronic illness, and one of the top 10 leading causes of death in women of all age groups up to 64 years.
Significant medical research efforts have been devoted to understanding the mechanism of autoimmune diseases and finding effective diagnosis and treatments therefore. Many autoimmune diseases are now characterized by the presence and undesirable activities of autoantibodies. These autoantibodies recognize and bind to often normal and healthy self antigens, thereby causing significant damages and failures of relevant tissues and organs.
Immune thrombocytopenia is an autoimmune hematological disease that is characterized by an attack by the immune system that destroys platelets in the blood, resulting in an abnormally low platelet count. The platelet destruction is due to the presence of antiplatelet autoantibodies, which are antibodies directed against the patient's own platelets. This low platelet count can lead to easy bruising, bleeding gums or nose and, less commonly, to severe internal bleeding.
In clinical practice, immune thrombocytopenia is difficult to diagnose due to similarity in clinical symptoms with other diseases such as anaphylactoid purpura, myelodysplastic syndrome, multiple myeloma and other non-immune mediated thrombocytopenia. Generally, diagnosis of immune thrombocytopenia is a process of exclusion, and many clinical tests need to be performed for exclusion of many other diseases (such as the diseases described above) before reaching the diagnosis of immune thrombocytopenia. These clinical tests may take several months or even longer to go through and thus significantly delay proper treatment to the patients.
Furthermore, some diseases such as aplastic anemia, acute leukemia, systemic lupus erythematosus, Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, Evans syndrome can also cause immune thrombocytopenia in the course of disease development and progression. Such immune thrombocytopenia is called secondary immune thrombocytopenia, to distinguish it from primary immune thrombocytopenia, which is caused originally by an autoimmune response against the platelets. It is also importance to determine the onset of secondary immune thrombocytopenia in patients for timely treatment.
Therefore, one of the challenges in clinical treatment of immune thrombocytopenia is the accurate and early diagnosis of the disease in a patient.